Reading Writing

This first English-language edition of En lisant en écrivant marked a turning point in the public reception of Julien Gracq. Here he emerged as the ideal critic, a reader who accompanied himself in his reading like a “polite third party.”

Every reader is a potential writer and every writer is a reader in actuality. Reading Writing is a subjective history of fiction and poetry and a personal meditation on the links between literature and two visual arts: painting and cinema. Gracq’s poetics is founded upon the basic acts of reading and writing and on the relationship between the writer and his language.